Walking School Bus

Broadway: A Community on the Move’s community partnership initiated a successful Walking School Bus pilot at Mound Elementary in 2004. In the Walking School Bus program, children walk to school together in organized groups. After the pilot, Cleveland Mayor Jane L. Campbell became aware of this innovative program and asked all of her cabinet members to participate in a Walking School Bus in Slavic Village on May 4, 2005, drawing extensive media attention from all five television stations, radio stations and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

The goals of the Walking School Bus are to get children to be more physically active and to decrease crime on the way to and from schools.

After reviewing the success of the pilot program, the Mayor and her cabinet decided to implement the Walking School Bus program in over 100 schools citywide. Mayor Campbell has asked that all Cleveland elementary schools implement this program by August 2005. In response, the Broadway: A Community on the Move partnership teamed up with Cleveland’s Steps to a HealthierCleveland program to create a Walk to School manual and Walking School Bus toolkit to be distributed to all interested schools. To assist in replicating this program across the city, Steps to a Healthier Cleveland will be supervising walk to school events at ten elementary schools, while Broadway: A Community on the Move covers five schools in their project area. The organizations will also work together to train other Cleveland community development corporations to spread the Walking School Bus program further into the city. The user-friendly manual and toolkit will become available for all other interested schools in the district. With the help of the Mayor and her progressive cabinet, Broadway: A Community on the Move’s work in Slavic Village is now having an impact across the entire city.